Toshiba T235-S1345 AMD Turion II Notebook Review - Entering the Nile

Entering the Nile

Earlier this year AMD released big news: 135 new design wins with major manufacturers including Acer, ASUS, Dell HP, Lenovo, Toshiba and more. These victories are a badly needed boost for AMD, which has been trailing Intel in the mobile space for years. These many of these new designs are based on a new platform AMD is calling Nile - and the Toshiba T235 is among the first Nile notebooks to hit the market.

The T235 is a harbinger - and not just for AMD. Toshiba has also been struggling somewhat as of late, at least when it comes to budget ultraportables. Toshiba's earlier ultraportable, the T135, failed to earn much critical praise. The T235 is Toshiba’s chance to prove that it can compete in this market.

So, what's in this new Nile-powered ultraportable? Well, have a look for yourself:

There are several advancements here, some of which are more explicit than others. The platform has moved to support for 45nm processors. Memory support has moved from DDR2 to DDR3 and the HyperTransport link is now up to AMD's latest 3.0 standard. The graphics have made a slight technical leap forward, as well, enabling DirectX 10.1 support.

None of this is exotic, but it doesn't need to be. AMD's problem has never been that it is shamefully outclassed by Intel - but it has been behind in both performance and battery life. The Toshiba T235 is one of the first new Nile products to hit the market, providing the perfect opportunity to see how AMD – and Toshiba – has improved.